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Royal Caribbean Cruises wants its pork suppliers to detail their efforts to eliminate gestation crates used to confine pregnant pigs.

Royal Caribbean Cruises has announced it will retrofit 19 of its ships with advanced emissions purification (AEP) systems, also known as scrubbers, which will remove more than 97 percent of the sulfur dioxide emissions generated by the ships' diesel engines.

JetBlue is teaming up with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help Caribbean vacationers avoid contributing to the illicit trade of threatened and endangered species.

Global trade has made it easier to buy things. But our consumption habits often fuel threats to biodiversity - such as deforestation, overhunting and overfishing - thousands of miles away. Now, scientists have mapped how major consuming countries drive threats to endangered species elsewhere. Such maps could be useful for finding the most efficient ways to protect critical areas important for biodiversity, the researchers suggest in a new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. For example, the maps show that commodities used in the United States and the European Union exert several threats on marine species in Southeast Asia, mainly due to overfishing, pollution and aquaculture. The U.S. also exerts pressure on hotspots off the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and at the mouth of the Orinoco around Trinidad and Tobago. European Union's impacts extend to the islands around Madagascar: Réunion, Mauritius and the Seychelles. The maps also revealed some unexpected linkages. For instance, the impact of U.S. consumption in Brazil appears to be much greater in southern Brazil (in the Brazilian Highlands where agriculture and grazing are extensive) than inside the Amazon basin, which receives a larger chunk of the attention. The U.S. also has high biodiversity footprint in southern Spain and Portugal, due to their impacts on threatened fish and bird species. These countries are rarely perceived as threat hotspots.

Necker Island, a small Caribbean island owned by business icon Richard Branson, has signed a contract to slash its diesel fuel use by building a renewable energy-powered microgrid.

This new scenario modeling system helps planners in Latin America and the Caribbean make more informed infrastructure investments.

Cruise Lines International Association's (CLIA) members - including Royal Caribbean International, Carnival and Disney Cruise Line - will no longer participate in Friends of the Earth's environmental survey.

Latin America and the Caribbean are due for an ecological makeover. The World Resources Institute (WRI) says it already has the funding committed to restore some 131 million degraded lands across the region. The project has 16 investors so far. Another 19 investors are already hard and work funding the restoration of more than 24 million acres.

Bonaire (pop. 14,500), a small island off the coast of Venezuela, is famous for its beautiful marine reefs, which are visited by 70,000 tourists every year. What many of the tourists don't realize is that the majority of the electricity powering their needs comes from renewable energy. Yet for the residents of Bonaire, the switch from fossil-fueled to renewable energy systems has made a world of difference.